Straight-out-of-the-gate, District three’s Steve Novick and D4’s Olivia Clark received more than the (25% + 1) of votes needed to win a City Council position, making them last night’s only candidates to “win” the count on first choice rankings alone. Other candidates also received a winning (25% + 1) votes, but they needed many rounds of transfer votes to arrive at that tally.
Keep in mind that this is only the first day of vote tabulation, the District four tabulation was based on about 45,000 verified ballots, or 38% of approximately 120,000 eligible voters. More ballots will be coming in over the next few days, and the Multnomah County Election Division will be rerunning the ranking calculation fresh each day, on the entirety of all verified ballots.
Also worth noting is that there were not any Council District upsets in which a candidate was dislodged out of the first place position by another candidate’s accumulated transfer votes.
Multnomah County has posted detailed grids of the rankings and vote transfers, making it possible to trace through, round by round, how “winners” accumulated their votes. Anyone who has followed my posts knows that this is catnip for me. And after going through the table of transfers I can declare a winner: ranked-choice voting (RCV), with single-transferable vote (STV) in multi-member districts.
It’s a mouthful, but a closer look at some of the D4 transfers shows that, yes, the method successfully gives a voice on council to voters who hold minority positions on issues.
This is going to be another one of my dweeby posts which gets into the weeds with the STV algorithm and some numbers. But by the end of it I hope to show how a minority position in District four, namely a deep discomfort with jailing campers who refuse to accept relocation to city-provided alternative shelter or treatment, found its expression in candidate Mitch Green through transfer votes. (At least after day-1 of tabulation).
As an example, I’m going to look at the fate of three of the top-ranked candidates — Eric Zimmerman, Mitch Green and Eli Arnold — and show how the transfer votes of much lower-ranked candidates Lisa Freeman, Chad Lykins and Sarah Silkie dealt Portland police officer Eli Arnold a blow in the final rounds. At play is the issue of law enforcement’s roll in enforcing Portland’s camping ban. Clark, Zimmerman and Arnold advocate for a “Shelter for all” approach to camping, in which the possibility of being arrested acts as a “backstop” to requiring a range of other living situations, including treatment and Portland’s Temporary Alternative Shelter Sites (TASS).
Green, Freeman, Lykins and Silkie are more acceptable to voters who prefer the Multnomah County’s “Housing First” model, which advocates for permanent housing without treatment requirements or sobriety barriers.
The screenshots I’m showing come from Multnomah County’s Unofficial Preliminary Election Results. The top segment shows Olivia Clark in first place with 12,315, or 27%, of the votes. Because she is over the 25% + 1 required to win, 1,053 of her votes are “transferred” to other candidates based on who her voters ranked as their 2nd choice. As you can see in the 3rd column, about half of Clark’s voters ranked Zimmerman 2nd, and also favored Eli Arnold. This transfer of 519 moves Zimmerman to 2nd place (12.59%), a lead he holds for all but one of remaining rounds.
Clark’s vote transfer puts Eli Arnold and Mitch Green in an even tighter race for the remaining rounds, and they stay in a tight range until the final rounds which eliminated Lisa Freeman, Chad Lykins, and Sarah Silkie. The transfers from those candidates favored Green over Arnold by several-fold, and opened up to a five-point lead for Green in the final three rounds.
And that’s how a minority position about enforcing Portland’s camping ban has found an expression in one of the three District four representatives.
Take all of this with the caveat that the total vote is not yet in. Multnomah County will release tonight’s counts at 6:00 PM. I will be looking to see if there is any change in ordering that is associated with early voters versus those whose ballots came in too late for the Tuesday count.
